The Garden Tour Is Welcome To My House

Get Serious!

My house is not going to be showing up, I'm afraid, on this month's Garden Week tour. But that's OK. Been living in it 28 years and I'm 0 for 28, so I'm accustomed.

The thing is, you pay to go to one of these home-tour houses, and you expect to see a nice mess of architecture for your money. My house hasn't got any architecture.

When this house was built, the builder said, "You want we should slap some architecture on this baby?" And the owner asked, "How much will that cost?" And when the builder told him, the owner said, "Nah, leave the architecture off. We'll just watch TV."

There are many different schools of architecture, as you know. There is Classical architecture, and Colonial architecture, and Victorian architecture. In the South, we had Antebellum architecture, which featured grand, pillar-intensive plantation houses. (Then there was Postbellum architecture, which mainly featured piles of cinders.)

And then there is Modern architecture, which was all the rage until people got tired of it, so now we have Post-Modern stuff, which is a neat trick if you ask me. (Question for class discussion: What comes after Post-Modern?)

And there is my house, which apparently belongs to the "You Got Your Floor, You Got Your Walls, You Got Your Roof, What's Your Beef?" School.

Furthermore, there is the matter of interior decoration. These showplace homes have lots of interior decoration, and mine doesn't have interior decoration. All I have is stuff.

Interior decoration also comes in various styles, like Early American, or Country, or Mediterranean. Actually, I did have some Mediterranean decor once, but then somebody broke the "Souvenir of Naples" ashtray.

Don't have any antiques, either. Although I do have some things in plastic containers in the refrigerator that have been there longer than I can remember, so maybe they're on their way.

My one hope for home-tour glory might be the garden angle. We have in our yard as impressive a collection of lush, healthy greenery as ever wowed 'em at the Botanical Garden. Unfortunately, the lush greenery follows Tony's Law of Reverse Horticulture, which states: "The plants you want to grow, unless they get exactly the right amount of water and sun and fertilizer and pH-balanced soil, will wilt and shrivel and emit ghastly choking noises in their little plant voices and die, whereas the plants you don't want will grow unstoppably, even if you pour battery acid on them daily."

So the healthy stuff is mostly the stuff we didn't plant. And the stuff we didn't plant is mostly -- well, there's this wisteria.

You remember those 1950s horror movies, where some goofy scientist would be messing around with radiation, and the next thing you knew there was an ant or spider or octopus the size of a Wal-Mart, tromping around the landscape?

One of those mad scientists must have been messing around our neighborhood back then, because we have The Wisteria That Ate York County.

Nearly three decades of struggle, and this wisteria remains undefeated and defiant. I know, they say a man's reach should exceed his grasp, but the trouble is the wisteria's grasp exceeds our reach. Its vines climb all the way up trees and power poles like King Kong scrambling up the Empire State Building. Then it slinks along the ground and pops up unexpectedly, like the creatures in "Alien."

Once I made the mistake of standing still in the yard for a while, and before I knew it a wisteria vine was hungrily creeping around my ankle, just like (to drag in one more movie simile) the man-eating plant in "Little Shop of Horrors." If this thing starts singing like Levi Stubbs, I'm not venturing out of the house.

Why this wisteria is so aggressive, I don't know. Maybe it is suffering from raging pH imbalance.

If Saddam Hussein had been really devilish, he would have planted some of this wisteria around Baghdad. Even the U.S. Marines would have a hard time getting through it. It is a weapon of mass obstruction.

So my hat is off to the accomplished and tasteful folks who have made their homes and gardens beautiful enough for people to want to tour them. If anybody wants to tour my house, they're welcome, but they'll have to remember: When you're out in the yard, keep moving.

Tony Gabriele can be reached at 247-4786 or by e-mail at tgabriele@dailypress.com